Our Knowing Compelled to Go Back: Speculative Misreading and the Identity of Blood Meridian

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) resists or problematizes many of the literary categories that frequently organize our reading: modern or postmodern, Western novel or Southern novel, national allegory or historical metafiction or apocalyptic thriller. I propose an alternative to such categories of genre, movement, or literary genealogy—reading the novel as a self-conscious, narrative working-through of a literary-philosophical problem. The concept that Blood Meridian continually circles without fully resolving, I suggest, is a problematic ontology of violence, problematic because it appears to assert both the utter contingency of human existence and the absolute self-determination of human will. Historicist, aesthetic, or political readings of the novel that fail to address this problem will always be unsatisfactory. I offer what I call a speculative reading which moves this problem to the center of the text, and examines the text’s attempts to resolve it.